“I ain’t a somebody, though, miss,” Tommy said softly, almost convincing.“I’m nobody.Ithinkto myself.I don’t hurt nobody.”He looked up at the bell tower, and for a second, something like longing crossed his face.“I like it up there.”
“Who is the list for?”Kate asked.
Tommy’s silence was round and stubborn.It had a name—fear, usually.But sometimes loyalty.
“Listen,” Kate said, patiently.“The list we found—”
“Don’t know no list,” he interjected, almost politely, like someone saying ‘you’re welcome’.
“—has names on it,” she finished gently.“Important names.If you know anything about it, Tommy, now’s the time to tell me.Because if you don’t, you’re taking a ride with us, and you’re going to sit in a very cold room with very bright lights while we figure out if you’re the author or just the man who borrowed the pen.”
“I can’t write proper,” Tommy said with sudden pride.“Not like that.”He tilted his chin at the bag in Park’s hand.“That’s… that’s real writing.”
“It’s not,” Park said, before she could stop herself.“It’s childlike.But those names?Those are very grown-up names.”
Torres shot her a look.Park subsided, cheeks hot.
“Let’s search him properly,” Marcus said.“Then decide if we want to have this heart-to-heart on the sidewalk.”
They turned him and did it by the book—arms, legs, belt, socks.A second, much smaller wad of cash appeared from a pocket deeper inside the coat, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag to keep it dry.A folded flyer for a soup kitchen on 138th.Two bus tickets, never punched, glued together by old candy.No phone.No knife.A dime bag with a smear of brown.And a small metal cross on a cheap chain, the kind you win at a festival when you’re twelve.
“How long you been here, Tommy?”Marcus asked.
“I come and go.”
“Since when?”
He squinted at the sky as if the answer lived in the clouds.“Can’t recall.”
“You there last night?”
Tommy’s jaw tensed.“I told you I ain’t—”
“Save it,” Torres said.“We’ll sort timelines when my desk isn’t a sidewalk.”
A clatter above made them all look up.Pigeons again, or the building remembering a different winter.Park shifted, ready to catch a movement that didn’t come.The alley held its breath and then exhaled an old newspaper.A siren muttered far away and lost interest.
“Torres,” Kate said.“We need to get this site processed before the neighbors get curious.CSI for the nave and the sacristy.Bag every scrap and staple.Post two bodies on the tower access and one by the door.And I want any footage from buildings across the street—if anyone had a window open and a phone in their hand, we need to know what they saw run across their roof.”
“You got it,” Torres said.She was already talking to her radio as she said it.
Kate looked down at Tommy.He’d gone quiet again.
“Okay, Tommy,” she said.“Here’s what’s going to happen.You’re coming with us to the Fifteenth.We’re going to ask you the same questions we just asked you, only slower, and you’re going to have more chances to lie and fewer chances to run.If there’s something you want to say that might make your life easier, that will be an excellent time.”
Tommy met her gaze and held it for a surprisingly long beat.Then he nodded as if to himself.“I didn’t do nothing,” he said.“I justthleepthere.Sometimes I pick things up if they’re on the floor.You can’t leave things on the floor.It’s disrespect.”
“To who?”Marcus said.
“To the floor,” Tommy said, without irony.“And the church.”
Kate swallowed a sigh that tasted like soot.“Marcus, cuff him.”
He did, the clicks loud in the close air.Tommy almost flinched on the second one and then didn’t.The learned stillness of a man who had, at some point in some other life, been taught what resistance brought you.
“Watch your step,” Park said, not unkindly, as they turned him toward the mouth of the alley.“It’s slick.”
They walked him out between the broken dumpsters and the graffiti and the rusted fire escapes.The squad car idled at the curb, its breath white in the cooling evening.Marcus put a hand on Tommy’s head to guide him in without cracking it on the frame.Tommy ducked with well-practiced grace.
